Janet Daley was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty years in academic life before becoming a political commentator: all factors that inform her writing on British and American policy and politicians.

In my day, student visas were hard to get

I am simply astonished by what appears to be the total collapse of controls over student visas in Britain.

When I arrived here from the US in the 1960s, getting a visa that would permit me to stay in the country as a post-graduate student was a rigorously policed obstacle course which involved the personal testimonial of the head of my academic department at London University, strict time limits on my period of stay to be confirmed at the end of each academic year, and my registration at the local police headquarters at regular intervals (and re-registration if I changed my UK address).

If I wanted to take on paid employment in order to support myself while studying (as I had throughout my undergraduate years in America), I would have to apply as well for something called a "work permit" which came, if I remember rightly, from the then Department of Labour. I can remember vividly trying to explain to two sets of government bureaucrats why it was necessary for me to hold both a student visa and a work permit – the concept of a "working student" being quite alien to the British university tradition in that era.

The story did have a happy ending. Marriage to a Briton rescued me from the inherently suspect status of "registered alien" by giving me an indefinite visa with a permanent right to stay in the UK – but still not the right to vote even though I paid taxes to Her Majesty's Inland Revenue. (The American revolutionary principle of "no taxation without representation" seemed not to have made any permanent impression on the British governing philosophy.) So I applied for and received British naturalisation – a process which would now, ironically, be less straightforward - whereupon the US took away my American citizenship. Some years, and one Supreme Court decision later, the US decided that no American-born citizen could be deprived of his nationality without actually renouncing it. So I asked for my US citizenship back – and got it. I am now officially a dual national.

The point of this story is that there was, within living memory, a time – and, bizarrely, it was a much less dangerous time – when moving from one country to another was a closely monitored, carefully examined, business. It would be nice to think that allowing the free movement of people in and out of Britain had been motivated by a love of personal liberty. In fact, it seems more to do with the rapacious desire for cheap labour and the need for academic institutions to rake in hugely profitable foreign student fees. So today's London – the city where I once had such a struggle to be allowed to live – has become a world capital of terrorist recruitment.